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The career of the actor Lynn Dalby, who has died from the lung condition COPD aged 78, embraced drama, sitcoms and soap, as well as the West End stage, but she will be best remembered as Adam Faith’s girlfriend in Budgie on television.
Over two series (1971-72), she played Hazel Fletcher, a jobbing actor in a relationship with Budgie, the petty criminal whose real name is Ronald Bird. With comic elements thrown in, he is usually out of his depth in money-making antics that backfire, often commissioned by Charlie Endell, an underworld villain and strip club owner (played by Iain Cuthbertson). The opening credits depicted him grabbing at banknotes blowing in the wind.
The first episode ended with Budgie, just released from jail and estranged from his wife (Georgina Hale), bringing back to Hazel’s flat a fruit machine stolen from a cricket club. By the start of the second series, when he is again emerging from a spell in prison, he and Hazel – who is pregnant with their second child – are no longer together, although she soon takes him back.
Dalby said she empathised with her put-upon character. “I think she just wants security and stays with Budgie because he’s all she has,” she explained. “I can imagine doing the same thing in her position.”
In 1972 Dalby switched to a role in the newly launched ITV soap opera Emmerdale Farm (later retitled Emmerdale), centred on the farming Sugden family in a small Yorkshire Dales community. Her character, Ruth Merrick, first seen in episode seven, harboured a secret – her son, Jackie, whom her husband Tom believed to be his, was fathered by her ex-lover Jack Sugden.
During two stints, in 1972 and 1974, there was no rekindling of the flames and Ruth attempted suicide before settling down in Leeds with Tom (although the character was brought back in 1980, going by her first name of Pat instead of her middle name, and with a different actor, Helen Weir, taking over the role).
In 1977 Dalby married the actor Ray Lonnen, but they divorced in 1983 and a year later Dalby emigrated to Sydney, Australia. She continued her career on screen and stage there before returning to Britain in 2019.
She was born in Harrogate, North Yorkshire (then in the West Riding of Yorkshire), to Veronica (nee Lawson) and David Dalby. As a sergeant in the British army’s Medical Corps, he moved the family around to Cyprus and West Germany before returning to Harrogate and working as a jeweller’s dispatch manager.
From the age of 12, Lynn trained at the Corona Academy in London, at the same time appearing in uncredited roles as schoolgirls in the films The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s (1960) and Spare the Rod (1961). “I was one of those freckle-faced precocious children,” she recalled later, when she complained that her height (5ft 2in) and fresh-faced look for a long time meant she was always cast as “the dizzy secretary or the daughter who falls in love with the head boy”.
Dalby’s early career in touring companies and repertory theatre included a stint in her home town before she performed in a string of West End musicals. She played the milkman Tevye’s bookish daughter Chava in Fiddler on the Roof (Her Majesty’s theatre, 1970-71), but was unfortunate to appear in two short-lived flops, Lie Down I Think I Love You (Strand theatre, 1970) and Romance! (Duke of York’s, 1971), before Budgie came along.
By then, she had already reached a wide television audience as Rita, one of the two female gnomes in the writer Jimmy Perry’s BBC sitcom The Gnomes of Dulwich (1969), alongside Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd.
She later played a French diplomat’s daughter coerced into helping drug smugglers in Return of the Saint (in 1979) and appeared in the BBC’s Francis Durbridge thriller serial Breakaway (1980) before joining Crossroads. As Rita Hughes (1980-81) in the ITV soap, she was a secretary who became another notch on the bedpost of Adam Chance (Tony Adams), an accountant on his path up the motel management ladder.
Repeated television screenings of the 1975 horror film Legend of the Werewolf, starring Peter Cushing and Ron Moody, kept her face in front of audiences, playing an orphaned sex worker who falls for a “wolfman” played by David Rintoul.
On moving to Australia, Dalby was on television in the mini-series Tusitala (1986) as the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson’s vicar friend there during the novelist’s final years, the soap opera Sons and Daughters as Joyce Carter (in 1987) and popular series such as Water Rats (in 1996) and All Saints (in 2001).
She is survived by Amy, her daughter with Lonnen, and her two sisters, Lesley and Gillian.
